Poland to hold out for more EU money

With 10 days left to a decisive summit on the European Union's historic enlargement, the biggest candidate Poland said Dec. 2 it would hold out for more money before sealing an entry deal.

However, in Brussels the EU authorities warned the members-to-be not to jeopardize the EU's enlargement drive by demanding too much before the make-or-break Dec. 12-13 summit in Copenhagen.

In a sign of the horse trading ahead, Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller urged EU member states to improve on a compromise plan from the Danish EU presidency aimed at paving the way for a deal.

"The candidate countries have two objectives. First, they have to convince our partners in the EU that the Danish proposal makes sense, and that they should support it," Miller said.

"Second, they have to ask [the EU] to add 1.2 billion euros to the sum proposed by Denmark," he said.

Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia are all hoping to receive the green light at the Copenhagen summit to join the EU on May 1, 2004.

First, however, the candidates have to agree on the most difficult issue in membership talks: money. That means how much they will get from the EU in terms of farm subsidies and other financial aid.

In its compromise plan floated to candidates, Denmark has proposed improving on the financing terms agreed by EU leaders at an October summit in Brussels.

However, some EU member countries, keen to keep a tight hold on the purse strings, say Denmark has been too generous.

Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister, the EU's biggest net contributor, said last week Copenhagen had put forward the proposal "without having consulted its partners."

"That creates problems," Fischer said. "Whether they will be resolved and how is difficult to say."

EU candidates, on the other hand, say Denmark has not been generous enough and are trying to squeeze out the best they can, knowing that the cost of failure for the union's plan to expand across the former Iron Curtain is too great.

"It is absolutely indispensable that as many questions as possible are settled before the European summit in Copenhagen," European Commission spokesman Jean-Christopher Filori told reporters.

"If this is not the case, we run the risk of having a European Council devoted to bargaining about milk quotas. And this can go in any direction, including failure," he warned.

In Poland, a farming-intensive country of 38 million people, the government is aware of the domestic repercussions of taking home a bad entry deal.

Support by the country's millions of farmers will be needed when it holds a referendum on membership early next year.

And the Peasants Party, a key force in Poland's ruling leftist coalition, has threatened to quit unless Warsaw secured better terms for its farmers.

Poland's chief negotiator Jan Truszczynski said last week that Warsaw had judged as "almost acceptable" an EU proposal on farm aid, which would limit the amount of direct farm subsidies to new countries to a quarter of that received by current EU members.

But he said more work had to be done on a way of making up the subsidies to farmers by other means, particularly by transferring other EU aid.

In its proposal, Denmark caps the amount of aid that can be redirected.

On Dec. 2, however, Farm Minister Kalinowski hit out at the Danish attempt to set a cap on how much governments in candidate countries can help their farmers.

"We do not agree to them limiting the amount of direct aid to farmers in the candidate countries to 40 percent of what is in force in the EU member states," he said.

"What right do they have to refuse us the same competitive rights?" he said.